Real coffee grounds are good, but there might be some other kind of grounds in your morning cup of joe.
Due to a recent coffee been shortage, producers may be turning to finely ground fillers – such as wood, husks, whole coffee berries and even pieces of earth – to offset their losses, a new report revealed.
The fillers resemble coffee once roasted and ground, making it difficult to visually confirm the blended contents. But what's really troubling is that "normal people can't taste [the difference]," said Suzana Lucy Nixdorf to Yahoo News. Nixdorf was the lead researcher on the team that produced the eyebrow raising report.
The bean shortage is due to droughts and fungi that have been ravaging coffee farms, leading to an unexpected rise in the use of impurities, such as wood, twigs, leaves or other matter from the coffee plant Fox News reported.
"With a lower supply of coffee in the market, prices rise and that favors fraud because of the economic gain," Nixdorf said.
Other common filler ingredients, like wheat, soybeans and corn, are even more difficult to detect by taste but they certainly alter the quality of coffee.
"Corn is very common because it tastes sweet and people don't perceive the added sugar. The same [goes] for brown sugar," Nixdorf said via email. "That's why we need a method [that's] very sensible and not subjective [to determine] if the coffee is pure or not."
And Nixdorf has come up with just such a method. Her coffee test relies on statistical tools and lab techniques and can correctly determine whether or not a coffee sample is pure 95 percent of the time, according to Nixdorf's press release.
World coffee supplies are estimated to drop about 70 percent by 2080 because of conditions related to climate change, according to U.K.'s Royal Botanic Gardens and the Environment's 2012 study.
Nixdorf will present her report at the American Chemical Society annual meeting in San Francisco, according to Yahoo News.
"I hope the [coffee] industry will [use] this method to really guarantee quality without using fillers," Nixdorf said.
